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blackbearnh writes "With the release of the 3.1 iPhone OS, application developers will finally be able to develop augmented reality (AR) apps. In other words, Terminator Vision is right around the corner. O'Reilly Media recently talked to Chetan Damani, one of the founders of Acrossair, about how they developed their new AR application, Nearest Tube, which displays the closest London Tube stations over a live video overlay on an iPhone 3GS. According to Damani, developing AR applications on the 3GS is dead easy, and the real trick will be developing good augmented reality apps. 'It's all about who's going to have the most amount of data and the most valid data. So there's the obvious types of apps which you're going to launch and those are the find me my nearest bar, find me my nearest event, find me the nearest tube stop, find me the nearest ATM. And those sorts of apps are all going to be around. But they're only going to be useful for when you're trying to look for things. So if we want to get users to use augmented reality a little bit more, we have to start introducing other bits of functionality, things like show me the offers available in a particular high street. Show me when I'm walking down a high street if there's a table available at a particular restaurant. And it's that sort of interactivity and providing that real-time data in this augmented reality view which is going to start getting people to use it a lot more rather than just for show me where the nearest area is.'"

Great! Just what we need! More ways people can walk around staring at a device in their hands while being utterly oblivious to their surroundings. And yet this is all about informing them of their surroundings. Oh, the irony...

I enjoy driving while looking through Terminator Vision on my iPhone. I have an app that tells me the year, make and model of the vehicle I'm about to make contact with. Then I use my iGun application [youtube.com] to finish them off.

Great! Just what we need! More ways people can walk around staring at a device in their hands while being utterly oblivious to their surroundings. And yet this is all about informing them of their surroundings. Oh, the irony...

Sounds to me like a great AR app. You walk around with your iPhone in front of you, and periodically, a message flashes up that says something like, "Move, dumbass, you're about to hit something."

Actually, Slashdot is on the verge of releasing their own augmented-reality iPhone app.
It will use the camera to visually assess the person you're talking to. Using various AI and fuzzy-logic techniques, it will assess the things the person most likely feels self-conscious about that day.
It will then use the 3g to access a database of previous slashdot comments, and suggest 10 appropriately snarky things to say.

I just whip out my phone and BAM! There's the nearest drug dealer. BAM! There's the nearest hooker! BAM! There's the cops, with a red outline so you know they are baddies. I think I could get used to this...